WHO warns of new deadly SARS-like virus

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of a new SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) type virus that could pose a global threat. The virus is not unknown but the virulent strain is known to be resistant to most effect drugs available.

Photo by Greg Knobloch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

This virus is not a true SARS virus; it is a so-called coronavirus which initially manifests as common cold, with symptoms ranging from cough, fever, shortness of breath and gastro-intestinal symptoms that could lead to pneumonia and kidney failure.

According to The Mayo Clinic, SARS, a contagious respiratory infection was at times fatal. The new infection was considered an epidemic but threatened to go pandemic if not contained.

To date, half the infected people had perished.

Meanwhile SARS, considered a non-issue in recent years had reared its ugly head yet again and WHO considered the problem an international issue because no affected country could contain the virus on its own.

Science was all at sea as to where the virus 'hid' or how people were getting infected or the time period for incubation raising alarm bells throughout the scientific community.

The recent SARS virus outbreak left 774 people dead and sickened 8,000 before it was contained, but the off-shoot virus was a mystery with unknown source. To date, the virus had been found in older men with other health issues and in animals.

The new respiratory virus that originated in the Middle East easily spreads between people and seems to be deadlier than SARS, doctors reported yesterday after investigating the biggest outbreak in Saudi Arabia.

Over 60 cases of what was now called Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), including 38 deaths, had been recorded by the World Health Organization in the past year, mostly in Saudi Arabia.

The illnesses had not spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003, which triggered a global outbreak that claimed about 800 people, before it was brought under control.

An international team of doctors that investigated around two dozen cases in eastern Saudi Arabia found the new coronavirus had several striking similarities to SARS, but unlike SARS, though, scientists remain baffled as to the source of MERS.

The team said in a worrying finding that MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) not only spread easily between people, but within hospitals.

The new virus shared the ability with SARS, a distant relative of the new virus.

According to Dr Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at John Hopkins Medicine, who ws part of the team, to him this felt a lot like SARS did.

Their report was published online yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.